


Abnormality

by tristesses



Category: The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer
Genre: Character Study, Ecological Horror, Gun Violence, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 15:23:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20084440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: The anthropologist comes back.





	Abnormality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

I had almost relaxed my guard when the anthropologist came back from the dead.

I should have known better —  _ did  _ know better, my only excuse being the stultifying effect of the biologist’s last attempt at hypnosis, which had worked better than I was comfortable with, and my utter focus on the landscape around me, the looming trees, the eerie, pristine silence. My eyes were peeled for danger: that boar again, the moaning creature in the mire, a sinkhole opening up and swallowing me like some great beast’s gullet. I was not looking for humans. I should have been.

She melted out of the shadows, so smoothly my eyes didn’t track her movements at first. It was as if the space between the trees was empty, and then, while I watched it, it inexplicably  _ wasn’t _ , my mind skipping like a scratched record as it tried to fill in the gap. Old instinct took over and I was out of the rickety chair, on my knee, with the rifle gripped in too-sweaty hands and pointed at the anthropologist — my teammate.

But she had been dead and acid-burned in the tunnel, her skin melted off, jaw wrenched open — no human could survive that. 

So, what was in front of me wasn’t human.

She stopped with a mildly quizzical expression on her face, lifting her hands in a gesture of good faith ten seconds too late, as if she was enacting instructions without enough processing power. She looked like the anthropologist. My mind kept catching on that, worrying it like a mutt with a raw and dripping bone. I knew the anthropologist’s face, knew the wine-stain birthmark spreading under her chin, knew her slight body in her fatigues. But this figure before me, this apparition, brought with it a sense of profound wrongness; it was  _ vague _ , somehow, a sketch instead of a picture, with none of the anthropologist’s curiosity, or her fear. Only a mild, half-interested expression. Only those dead eyes.

“Stay back!” I barked as it took a step closer, my finger slipping onto the trigger. “Stay the  _ fuck  _ back!”

The anthropologist halted. Was it a ghost? A zombie? If you’d asked me a month ago if I’d ever even let those questions into my brain, I’d have laughed at you. But this was Area X and I no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t.

“I just want to talk,” it said. The worst part was how it sounded like the anthropologist. It could’ve fooled anyone who hadn’t been in this hellhole. But the anthropologist was dead, dead, dead —

My finger twitched.

I shot it.

My hands were trembling; I didn’t aim well. The bullet punched it in the neck instead of the head, sending it stumbling backwards with a red spray of arterial blood arcing in front of it. It raised a hand to the bullet hole, mouth opening and shutting like a guppy.

“Oh,” it said.

It took another step forward.

I screamed and shot it again, and again, each bullet making its body jerk backwards, but it kept encroaching on my space. I shot it in the gut. I shot it in the chest. Nothing stopped it. I was screaming, still screaming, my throat burning with the force of it. Her corpse flashed in my mind over and over like a five-second looped video, slumped against the wall. This was impossible. Impossible.

I took out its knee and finally it fell on its hands and knees, gazing up at me with that same blankness — God, I wanted to destroy it, blow its face off, this mimicry of a woman I’d known.

I aimed.

I fired.

And missed, as it scuttled away on all fours, moving like a beetle, fast, too fast, leaving puddles of blood in its wake. This time, it entered the trees like a living creature and not an apparition, nothing but an animal fleeing its hunter.

But it was no animal. No human. No ghost. I didn’t have the framework to address what it was.

A kind of frenzy took me in the minutes, hours, days after I saw the anthropologist. With a knife, I hacked apart the canvas tent, convinced they would spew blood the instant my blade penetrated the tough fabric. Light shone and fractured in my vision, crazed reflections as if each blade of light refracted through a prism, and I could’ve sworn, would have bet my fucking life on it, that the tents screamed as they died — that Area X had taken these as well and sculpted them into something else. It occured to me that it if it could take the anthropologist, it could take  _ me  _ — control my mind, devour me. It could make me hurt myself. So I took apart the guns, military instinct taking over and dismantling them piece by piece with ease, tossing them around the camp until they were so mixed up it would take a great deal of patience to put them back together.

Patience. The biologist was patient. A thought struck me like a bullet: the biologist could be coming back, much in the same way the anthropologist had  _ come back.  _ And if she did --

I went to the records of our studies. That’s what she’d want; she would take them and use them against us. Systematically, I burned them, gritting my teeth and clamping my eyes shut against the leaping frantic flame. And the food — I could leave nothing that would help her survive.  _ Risk in the reward. _ Fucking traitor.

But when I settled, having torn apart the camp, disquiet still took me. There was nothing that would make me feel safe. I had been colonized by the fear, consumed by Area X.

In the distance, I saw a glow spiraling from a single point of light on the ground. I knew it was real. Maybe Area X was warping my vision, but I knew in my gut what it was: the biologist. She was coming back for me, just like the anthropologist. And I had to be careful, because the thing that created the facsimile of the anthropologist had gotten smarter — I knew it, knew it wanted me, knew it hungered for me, wanted my brain to absorb so it could learn what I was and go back to the real world, just like the last expedition —

I bit down my hysteria. I settled into the reeds with the rifled propped next to me. I waited for the biologist to come to me.

She would be here soon.


End file.
